ASPEN | Water managers are planning for an extremely dry summer as Colorado wraps up winter 2026 with the worst snowpack on record for early April.
The Colorado River basin has seen slightly drier water years, but never a hotter one in the era of modern record keeping. A March heatwave that broke records statewide fueled an early peak of the snowpack, followed by rapid melting. This was the warmest March in 132 years of record-keeping for Colorado – three to four degrees Fahrenheit warmer than any other March, according to the Colorado Climate Center.
“Climate change definitely raises the probability of heat waves significantly,” said Peter Goble, assistant state climatologist at Colorado State University. “This heat wave was so far out of the range of what we’ve seen in March before that I don’t expect this to be the new normal, but it was certainly made to some degree more likely by climate change.”
The month of March decimated Colorado’s snowpack, which was thin to begin with, during a time when snowpack is usually still accumulating. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center put the March 1 snowpack above Lake Powell at 52% of median. One month later, the April 1 numbers showed snowpack had declined dramatically to 23% of median.
“What snowpack was there was already among the lowest, if not the lowest on record, and it melted much more quickly than normal,” Goble said. “We saw melt rates more characteristic of May or June in March.”
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Early April status reports and forecasts are important because they provide a critical snapshot of assessing where things stand and how much water will be available for the summer. This week is typically when snowpack peaks for the year before it begins a gradual melt out. But snowpack in the Colorado River headwaters this year peaked nearly a month early on March 17 and now sits at just 27% of median. Snowpack in the Roaring Fork River basin is 26% of normal.
“We’ve never seen anything like this in memory,” said Raquel Flinker, director of interstate and regional water resources at the Colorado River District’s State of the River meeting in Grand Junction Tuesday. “If there’s anything in your memory about a dry year that you’ve seen, a warm year that you’ve seen, 2026 is beyond all of that. It’s far beyond 2002, which has been the year we normally think of as the worst year in hydrology.”
The big question is whether that record-low snowpack will turn into record-low runoff. Forty million people in the American Southwest depend on water from the Colorado River, which comes from the melting annual snowpack. Some streams may have already peaked for the year, something that normally occurs in early June for Western Slope streams.
“The streamflows are going to be much below normal,” Goble said. “But the lowest snowpack on record does not necessarily guarantee the lowest streamflow on record.”
In a Tuesday water supply briefing, hydrologist Cody Moser with the CBRFC said that the forecasted April through July inflow to Lake Powell this year is 1.4 million acre-feet, just 22% of normal and the third-worst on record. That’s down from the March forecast, which predicted 2.3 million acre-feet of inflow. The benchmark for low Powell inflows is 2002, which saw just 964,000 acre-feet of water flow into the reservoir.
The streamflow forecast for the Colorado mainstem in Colorado (known as Division 5 by state water managers) is 38% of normal, according to the National Resources Conservation Service. The Yampa is at 36% of normal; Gunnison is 34% and the San Juan basin in the southwest corner of the state is forecast to have just 26% of normal streamflows this year.
Yampa calls
Water managers around the state are preparing for an exceptionally dry summer. Some municipal water providers have already implemented outdoor watering restrictions, and the Colorado Division of Water Resources is alerting farmers and ranchers to the possibility of more calls this season.
The Yampa River basin is poised to be one of the hardest hit this year. Mosher said on Tuesday that streamflows on the Yampa are forecasted to be close to the minimum on record.
“This forecast declined by 40% in the past month and here you see that huge melt off with our snowpack conditions,” he said.
Yampa River Operations Coordinator for Division 6 Water Resources Brian Romig sent a March 28 email to all water users in the basin reminding them of how calls work. When an irrigator with a senior water right isn’t getting all the water they are entitled to, they can place a call with state officials, who will then shut off upstream water users with junior water rights so the senior right can get its full amount of water. Under the cornerstone of Colorado water law, the oldest water rights get first use of the river.
The Yampa River was among the last to develop in the sparsely populated northwest corner of the state and it had never had a call until 2018.
“Call administration is a reality of our future,” said Division Engineer Erin Light. “I think it’s very possible we are going to see calls and the sooner people start to understand what that looks like and become accustomed to it, the better.”
Light said she has been hearing from water users about how early they have had to turn their ditches on to irrigate their fields – some the weekend of March 21 – due to the meager snowpack and record-high temperatures.
Light predicted that some ranchers won’t be able to grow all of the hay their animals need to feed them through next winter.
“Ranchers are going to have some big decisions to make as far as: Will they buy hay or will they have to sell cows,” she said.
In recent years, the River District has leased water out of Elkhead Reservoir and released it during the irrigation season to boost flows for downstream ranchers and keep a call off the river. But Light says this approach doesn’t help water users adapt to a future with less water. Once people know what to expect and how calls are administered, it’s less of a big deal, she said. And as river flows continue to dwindle due to drought and climate change, learning how to manage inevitable scarcity has never been more important.
“I think it’s a good thing for our water users to manage their water in such a way that they know in late August, they could be shut off,” Light said. “But we’re not giving that opportunity to the people on the Yampa River by trying to always keep the calls off.”
Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit aspenjournalism.org.
“This was the warmest March in 132 years of record-keeping for Colorado ”
So, the warmest March since records started being kept in….1894. Meanwhile, the climate of the American West and especially the Colorado River Basin has been known long before temperatures began to be documented.
There’s a reason John Wesley Powell called them the “arid lands,” and it wasn’t for dramatic effect.